World's only vegan football club gets green light for sustainable stadium

Published by

Nicky Godding

Nailsworth-based Forest Green Rovers has been given the green light to built a new sustainable stadium after being granted outline planning permission by Stroud District Council

After submitting revised plans to Stroud District Council, having seen the first attempt rejected back in June, the council’s planning committee voted in favour of the designs, with six in favour and four against.

Eco Park, designed by Zaha Hadid, will be a 5,000 capacity state-of-the-art wooden stadium on Junction 13 of the M5, along with landscaped parking and two pitches, one of which will be a 4G playing surface, with access for the local community.

Chairman, Dale Vince, said that the ‘right decision’ had been made and said that the best case for seeing the stadium come to fruition would be at least three years.

"Well done to the committee, this is where the project starts. It's been five years of work. And we'd been looking for a site for the previous three."

"It's going to take us years to get the stadium built, there's still a lot of work to do. Best guess is three years to get it built if we start tomorrow."

Nicky Godding

Nicky Godding is editor of The Business Magazine. Before her journalism career, she worked mainly in public relations moving into writing when she was invited to launch Retail Watch, a publication covering retail and real estate across Europe. After some years of constant travelling, she tucked away her passport and concentrated on business writing, co-founding a successful regional business magazine. She has interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs who have built multi-million-pound businesses and reported on many science and technology firsts. She reports on the region’s thriving business economy from start-ups, family businesses and multi-million-pound corporations, to the professionals that support their growth and the institutions that educate the next generation of business leaders.